Headlines

Tom Friedman

Israel should help the Palestinians build a state in the West Bank

The dangerous illusion Israel is dwelling in, argues Shavit, is the notion that “it can live like an autarky with no relation to the environment.” But no nation can do that, he argued, “certainly not a nation in which six million Jews share the land with more than five million Palestinians. Certainly not a nation that insists, even in the second decade of the third millennium, on occupying another nation.”

Indeed, the crazy dream Israel is keeping alive is that it can permanently occupy the West Bank, with its 2.5 million Palestinians, to satisfy biblically inspired settlers, who now hold major cabinet positions, like the housing portfolio, in Israel’s new government. With nearly 600,000 Israelis now living in Arab East Jerusalem and the West Bank, the window for a two-state solution “is slowly vanishing from the earth,” notes the Hebrew University philosopher Moshe Halbertal. Amazingly, polls still show a majority on both sides for a two-state deal, “but there is a deep trust problem” that has to be overcome — fast…

Which is why Palestinians need to drop all their preconditions and enter negotiations and Israel needs to halt settlements and test and test again whether President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad of the Palestinian Authority can deliver. Thanks to their cooperation with the Israeli security services, no Israeli was killed in the West Bank by terrorism in 2012. But Palestinians won’t sustain that restraint without movement toward a Palestinian state. The best way for Israel to deal with the chaos around it is not to put its head in the sand but to collaborate with Palestinians to build a West Bank state that is modern, secular and Westernizing; one where Muslims, Christians and Jews can work together and that stands in daily refutation of the failing Hamas/Muslim Brotherhood models elsewhere. If Israelis and Palestinians do not try everything — now — to make that happen, this will be remembered not as a lost opportunity but the lost opportunity, and no island will escape the storm that will follow.

Blowback

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Rightttt. As I recall when they left Gaza they left enough greenhouses to help feed most of the Jordanians( or as the rest of the world calls them Palestinians) and like the mental giants they are they destroyed them cause they used to belong to the jews. Who needs food when you can destroy stuff and then turn around and cry to the world your people are starving.

Indeed, the crazy dream Israel is keeping alive is that it can permanently occupy the West Bank, with its 2.5 million Palestinians, to satisfy biblically inspired settlers, who now hold major cabinet positions, like the housing portfolio, in Israel’s new government.

They’ve managed to hold it for the past 46 years. If anything, returning Gaza to the creeps accomplished very little.

When things are going well, the Israelis ease restrictions. This never gets reported.

Gut gezukt, Rixon. My father has a good one, but I don’t know how to render it in Yiddish: Friedman should lose all his teeth except one for a toothache.

Suggesting that Israel should help build a “Palestinian” state is akin to suggesting that Jews should build concentration camps. Even now, as Obama’s visit to Israel has set the punditocracy abuzz about “restarting” the piece process, I look on slack-jawed as the Friedmans (and sadly, the Netanyahus, also) of the world speak of the two-state solution as a much desired thing. Better to be frank: the “two-state solution” is another Final Solution to the Jewish problem in the Middle East.

Israel has been so sickened by its Left, that something catastrophic must happen, like a few thousand people dying at once, and then they might actually decide that one side or the other must win by a significant measure, and it might as well be them.

The question is the cost.

10,000?
25,000?
50,000?

In the meantime, with pressure from O’Bummer, a slow motion genocide is somehow acceptable.

The Jews should have driven all Arabs out of Israel in 1967 and lived with the consequences of honest re-conquest of their homeland.

As it is, this half-state “solution” with infiltration and a continuous chipping away of Israel for the illusory “peace” will only end when the Jewish state is annihilated by an overwhelming force of militant, fatalistic nuclear Muslim nations surrounding them.

Which, thanks to Iran, is inevitable.

A few score millions Muslims will die in such an armageddon, but the Koranic kooks will consider that a gfair price to pay in martyrs to eradicate the thorn-in-their-Islamic-side Zionist state.